GIBBETS BY THE WAY 105 



Doctor, if ever it revisits these scenes, might well be 

 satisfied with the quantity, although it is not incon- 

 ceivable lie would cavil at the quality. 



XI 



Tiikale Park has gone the way of all suburban 

 estates in these days of the speculative builder. The 

 house was pulled down so long ago as 1863, and its 

 lands laid out in building plots. Lysons, writing of 

 its demesne in 1792, says that " Adjoining the hoii/e 

 is an enclq/ure of about 100 acres, /urrounded with a 

 /hrubbery and gravel-walk of nearly two miles in 

 circumference." Trim villas and a suburban church 

 now occupy the spot, and the memory of the house 

 itself has faded away. Save for its size, the house 

 made no brave show, being merely one of many 

 hundreds of mansions built in the seventeenth century, 

 of a debased classic type. 



Streatham Common and Thornton Heath were still, 

 in Johnston's time, and indeed for long after, good 

 places for the highwaymen and for the Dark Lurk of 

 the less picturesque, but infinitely more dangerous, 

 foot-pad. Law-abiding people did not care to travel 

 them after nightfall, and when compelled to do so 

 went escorted and armed. Ogilby, in his " Britannia ' 

 of 1675, showed the pictures of a gallows on the summit 

 of Brixton Hill and another (a very large one) at 

 Thornton Heath ; and according to a later editor, who 

 issued an " Ogilby Improv'd ' in 1731, they still 

 decorated the wayside. They were no doubt retained 

 for some time longer, in the hope of affording a warning 

 to those who robbed upon the highway. 



At Norbury railway station the railway crosses over 

 the road, and eminently respectable suburbs occupy 

 that wayside where the foot-pads used to await the 

 timorous traveller. Trim villas rise in hundreds, and 

 where the extra large and permanent gallows stood, 



